


Sleeping

by apparitionism



Series: Boone, et cetera [1]
Category: Warehouse 13
Genre: F/F, Fix-It, eventually, for S4
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-26
Updated: 2014-05-27
Packaged: 2018-01-26 15:21:25
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 6,428
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1693094
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/apparitionism/pseuds/apparitionism
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Let's suppose that, after the Warehouse blew up, the pocketwatch remained an enigma. Result: angst and pain. Coping, or not. This two-part story will lead into "Boone," a much longer piece that is the real fixit.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This is a slight AU in that some details are different (such as how the pocketwatch works, such as there's no metronome), for the purposes of I felt like it.

Myka can’t sleep.

So she has taken to sleeping with women.

There is no Warehouse anymore. There is only a neverending series of storage facilities, even as the Regents assure everyone that progress is being made. But it’s been four months now, and while she and Pete go and retrieve artifacts, and neutralize them, and put them in _places_ , there is no Warehouse, there is no sleep, and most of all, there is no Helena.

But there are women.

Everywhere they go. And Myka has no illusions about what she’s doing or why she’s doing it. She’s doing it because if she were to let herself feel anything at all, she would break. Not in half, not into pieces, not in any way that she even knows how to make sense of. She would just be broken.

So instead, she is simply her body. She is her body and what it can do to other people’s bodies. And if, on retrievals, she has taken to hitting some of those bodies harder than is technically necessary, well, Pete has not said anything about it. And if she has taken to using her teeth on bodies that Pete knows nothing about, well, that is simply something she needs to do. Needs to know that she has done.

She had not noticed, before this, the way women would look at her. She supposes, when she bothers to suppose, that it’s because she’s tall. But it doesn’t matter. All that matters is that they look, and they don’t stop, and she brings one of them to her hotel room.

She hates being in Univille now. There are too few women, there is too much nostalgia, there are too many mournful looks from everyone else. Myka is not giving anyone mournful looks. Myka is a steel blade now.

Myka has, twice, been weak: she has let herself look back on who she was before.  The first time was two days after the end of her world. She thinks, now, that it happened because the initial shock wore off. The shock wore off, and she started thinking of what was gone. Of who was gone. She cried until she vomited, convulsing until she had nothing at all inside. That was the start of this life, her new life.

The second time was when she made the mistake of getting drunk. She had thought it would make her sleep. She was wrong: it made her think. It made her ache. It made her look at a picture of Helena. She knows better, now, than to ever do any of that again.

So she sleeps with women. (That is how she formulates it, when she thinks to, although she knows perfectly well that what she is doing is far more crude than that. Not naming the act is one of the few veils she allows herself.)

And it goes on. The others try to figure out the pocketwatch and bring the Warehouse back, but Myka has no room for such delusions of possibility. All Myka has room for is herself, pared down to the basics of life: breathing, eating, (not) sleeping.

One day Pete turns to her and says, “She wouldn’t like it.”

Myka ignores him. If it has nothing to do with the mission, then she has no need to listen to him.

“What you’re doing,” he goes on.

Myka keeps ignoring him. He’ll eventually give up and stop talking to her. He’s mostly given up already, and though that would have made the other Myka, that _before_ Myka, very sad, it makes this Myka that much more able to keep functioning.

“Because it’s like you don’t think anything is possible anymore.”

Myka slaps him. Hard.

He stands there for a second, staring at her. Then he grabs her hand, the one she slapped him with. He holds it up, and her palm is red. “I know you didn’t really want to do that,” he says. “I don’t care. I’m a big boy. I can take it, whatever it is you feel like you need to do to me. And I can stand aside and let you deal with bad guys however you want to, because you know what? They’re bad guys, and I’m not in much of a forgiving mood right now either. But I’m not gonna let you destroy yourself completely, and you know why? Because she wouldn’t like it. And I owe her.”

Myka wrests her hand away. “That’s right,” she grits out. “Because your mother is _alive_.”

“You know who else is alive?” he asks. “You. And that’s thanks to her, too. Do you really think she saved you—not once but twice—just so you could kill yourself?”

She puts her mind to work honing every edge she has, so she can cut his words to ribbons. She _hates_ him now. She hates his idea that he is going to somehow talk _sense_ into her. She hates his complete _ignorance_. Most of all, she hates the way he keeps saying “she,” and “her,” as if he’s somehow sparing her feelings by not saying Helena’s name. As if her name isn’t a constant drumbeat in Myka’s head, every minute, every second, every _nanosecond_.

If they still had the Warehouse, Myka thinks, she would be sorely tempted to find an appropriately powerful artifact and make herself forget. But they don’t still have the Warehouse. And all the artifacts they’ve retrieved so far have been ridiculous, pointless things, with so little power that Myka finds them pathetic. They’re pathetic, and so are the idiots who use them. Those fools know nothing about power. Nothing. And neither, she realizes, does Pete. She had always thought she was the analytical one—and, honestly, the smart one—but what she hadn’t understood, at all, was that she was the one who actually knew what they were doing.

This baptism, this fire, has given her clarity: artifacts are _things_ to him. They’re useful things, sometimes special things; they’re things that can perform certain tasks. They’re like his phone or his television or his remote-controlled helicopter. And his job is to go and get them so that people can’t keep performing tasks that might hurt other people.

But Myka has known better all along. Artifacts aren’t things, because the things don’t matter. What matters is the power they manifest. It’s like the atomic bomb, she thinks, when she bothers to think. It doesn’t matter that it’s a bomb; it doesn’t matter at all what thing it is. What matters is what it brings into the world. Or maybe: the version of the world it brings into being.

Artifacts are the concentrated power of the world they have brought into being. And on this count, Artie was right: Helena was an artifact. A dangerous concentration of power. But not enough power. In the end, not enough power. Not enough to stop what had been set in motion. Just enough to destroy Myka.

So, yes, Myka’s alive. She’s a body that breathes, that walks around, that hits people. She has discovered that now, she, the crack shot, infinitely prefers the solidity of her fist against someone’s flesh to the barely perceptible squeeze of her finger on a trigger. Yes, there’s still the gun’s kick, but the kick of a gun isn’t what does the damage. Myka wants to do the damage. Myka wants to feel the damage as it’s being done.

“Helena saved me,” Myka says now, enunciating each word carefully, “because she could. Because it was in her power to do so.”

“Right,” Pete says. “And because she wanted you to keep on living.”

“Listen to me, because I will say this to you only once. I’m sure Helena did want me to keep on living. Just as I wanted her to keep on living. But she _didn’t_ keep on living. And just as I couldn’t know how she would have reacted if she’d lived and I hadn’t, she didn’t know how I would react to her _not_ living. Do you think I would begrudge her anything at all if I’d died? Any way she’d tried to cope? If I could have saved her, I would have. I would have sacrificed myself in an instant.”

He shakes his head, as if she’s a child who’s made a particularly foolish choice—to run with scissors, or to touch an electrical outlet. “So that’s what you’re doing now? Sacrificing yourself? You can’t bring her back this way.”

She resists, somehow, the instinct to slap him again, harder this time. “I can’t bring her back _any_ way,” she says. “So if what I’m doing bothers you? I don’t care. If it would bother her? What does it matter? All that matters is that I keep breathing. And I am doing that. Do you think Helena’s daughter wanted her to be bronzed? Do you think the idea of that would have made her happy? But that was the only way Helena could keep breathing. So that’s what she did.”

“So you want to be bronzed? Is that what you want?” Pete shakes his head again.

“I want to be someone else,” Myka says. “And I am doing that in the only way I can.”

“Why don’t you just quit then? Go back to the bookstore, like you did before. Go do something else.”

“I’m not _fit_ to do anything else. And if you can’t understand that, then you can’t understand anything.”

“Well then explain it to me. Because I guess I’m just stupid, because I don’t get it. I don’t get how you can want to be someone else. We all love you, as _you_ and not someone else, and we need you. We’re having to deal with things too, you know. It isn’t just you who lost stuff.”

Myka’s hands are clenched into fists now. She is physically holding herself back. He is bigger than she is, and stronger, and if she were to hit him, he wouldn’t want to hit her back, but he could stop her before she did any real damage. And she wants to damage him. “I didn’t lose _stuff_ ,” she says. “I lost _everything_.”

He looks at her like she’s kicked him. “No you didn’t,” he protests. “I’m still here. Claudia, Artie, they’re here. I know she meant a lot to you, but you didn’t even… I mean, you hadn’t even known her that long. And she wasn’t even _around_ , like, for a year. I just don’t get how this… I just don’t get it.”

Myka has no idea how much he knows or doesn’t know. She doesn’t care anymore. She tries talking again, though she doubts it will do anything: “I’ll say it again. Maybe you’ll believe me this time: I lost _everything_. For the second time. At least the first time, I could console myself with the thought that she wasn’t dead. That she still existed, even if we couldn’t… even if we couldn’t.” She pauses. He looks like she’s kicked him again. “And you know something? I thought I couldn’t hate you more than I did when you were about to destroy that coin. I was wrong.”

He draws in a breath and screws up his face like he’s going to cry—but then he doesn’t. His face relaxes. He exhales and says, “You can hate me all you want, but guess what? I refuse to hate you back. And you know what else? If she made you hate me, then she _was_ a bad guy. Because you didn’t used to have hate in you. Now it’s all you seem to have. And what you’re saying is that that’s her fault. So yeah, okay, she really is the bad guy. For turning you into somebody just like her: all full of anger and grief and hate and nothing else. You win, Myka: you’re somebody else. But I _still_ won’t hate you. And neither will Artie, and neither will Claudia. We’re just gonna have to wait until you burn all of this out of yourself, because you will, and then you’ll be you again, and you’ll look back on this and you’ll wonder why you were so mean to us. Why you were so mean to _yourself_. And we’ll forgive you for it. So do what you have to.”

At that, Myka can’t keep from snorting out something like a laugh. It’s not a real laugh, but it’s as close as she’s come since it happened. She says, “God, yes, Pete, you’re so right. Helena turned me into something awful. A terrible villain, just like her. Anger and grief and hate. Because when the love of your life sacrifices herself for you, what you _should_ be left with is, I don’t know, happiness. Joy. A feeling that all’s right with the world, that everything is exactly as it’s supposed to be.” She wants to hit him again, but this time she doesn’t because: What would be the point? He’d just get that kicked-puppy expression, and she’d have to look at it. Or turn away from it. Either way, why bother?

Then he speaks, and again it becomes all she can do to keep from giving in to violence: “The love of your _life_? Come on. That’s just… that’s not even true.”

She feels an earthquake starting somewhere deep in her heart, and she knows with absolute clarity that if she tries to defend herself right now, she will fracture. If she has to somehow prove, or justify, or _establish_ , for him or for anyone else, this fundamental truth, she will lose her grip. And she refuses to lose her grip, refuses to acknowledge that she is gripping at all. That she is holding her heart completely still in hands that are made of iron. That she is refusing even to let it beat.

“If you ever,” she begins—but she realizes that saying it like that means she will have to articulate consequences. There is only one consequence, and even now, she knows she should not say it. She has to back up and start again. “Do not ever. Try to tell me. Again. What is true. About who I love. And how much I love her.”

Those are the last words she speaks to him for a week. He tries, twice, to say something nonutilitarian to her, as if they could possibly have a conversation; twice she ignores him. Maybe he was going to apologize. Maybe he was going to scoff again. It doesn’t matter at all. Nothing he could say is of any consequence. Nothing he could say would change anything in the slightest.

Myka tells Artie that she would prefer to be sent into the field alone. She hasn’t spoken to him much, either, these last weeks. He looks at her closely and says, “I don’t think that’s a good idea.” She shrugs and moves on; she can be around Pete if she has to. It doesn’t matter. Nothing matters.

She knows, intellectually, that something will have to give. _She_ can function this way forever; she is a machine. The rest of them aren’t. The rest of them will try to force some kind of change, just as Pete keeps doing. She doesn’t want it to happen. She doesn’t want anything to happen.

The third time Pete speaks to her, they’re heading out on a retrieval. “The weird thing,” he says, “is that I know you still have my back. In spite of all of it.”

“That’s part of my job,” Myka says. “I do my job.”

“I know you do,” says Pete. “And that’s both good and scary. That you can keep doing your job, even with everything that’s happened. Because that’s what keeps being hard for me—this idea that we’re still out there, snagging and bagging, even when there’s no place to _put_ artifacts. There’s no _home_ for them.”

Myka has no response to this, because there _is_ no response to this. It’s just a description of the way things are. Yes: there’s no home for the artifacts. But what else are they going to do? Like she told him before, she’s not fit for anything else. None of them are, she suspects. Maybe it _can_ go on like this forever, she thinks. Maybe it _will_.

Which of course means that, when they return from their next retrieval (the original Photo 51 of DNA: it gives the bearer undeserved acclaim, which is no help, Myka thinks, at all), Pete’s mother is waiting for them. “Come,” she says. “It’s time.”

“Time?” Pete barks. “Time for… what, exactly?”

“Time to speak of what comes next,” she says, sounding frighteningly like Mrs. Frederic.

TBC


	2. Chapter 2

Claudia, Artie, and Leena are waiting in the dining room for them. “We needed to wait until you got back,” Artie says. “We think we know how to make it work now.”

“The pocketwatch?” Pete asks, sounding pathetically enthusiastic.

“No, the electric light bulb,” Claudia deadpans, but with no real snap. “Of course the pocketwatch.”

“Look, I never know what anybody’s talking about these days,” Pete protests, with what he probably thinks is a significant glance at Myka. “I’m just making sure.”

“We think,” Jane says, “that it will be important for as many of us as possible to be where we were when the event happened. Which means I need to get to Hong Kong—my flight leaves soon. We’ll have the remaining Regents in place by tomorrow morning, and then we can proceed.”

“Proceed to what, exactly?” Pete asks. He hasn’t been particularly thrilled lately with the idea of letting his mother get very far away from him. Myka understands that. If Helena had survived, Myka would have shackled herself to the other woman. She wouldn’t have let so much as a molecule of air come between them, maybe ever again. She suppresses the urge to giggle; she knows it would sound hysterical. It would _be_ hysterical.

“Proceed to use the watch,” Artie says. “I have to wind it in exactly the right way, to exactly the right time. And then… well, I sort of make a wish. And time restarts.”

“You sort of make a wish? What wish? And what does ‘sort of’ mean?” Pete’s clearly not impressed. “And how did you figure this out, anyway? It came to you in a dream or something?”

Myka is leaning against the wall. She starts tapping her fingers against her thigh, because if she doesn’t _do_ something, she’s going to start thinking. And maybe start hoping. And if she does _that_ … so she’s tapping her fingers. She would rather be ripping her jeans to shreds, but that would make them all realize sooner rather than later that listening to this is pushing something inside her close to the ragged edge of giving way. She is not going to give any of them, and particularly Pete, that satisfaction.

“No,” Artie says pointedly, “it did not come to me in a dream. It came to me in James MacPherson’s notes. We finally—or, I should say, Claudia finally—managed to decipher the code he used to make notes on the artifacts he was intending to exploit.”

“But how do we know that _he_ knew how to use it?” Pete persists. God, he can be so dogged. But Myka wonders too, and she also wonders what might happen if, in their attempt to use the pocketwatch to perform whatever miracle they intend, something goes wrong.

“Well, why would he write it down unless he was pretty sure?” Claudia offers.

“ _Pretty sure_ is not going to cut it for me,” Pete says. “Because I bet we get only one chance, right? And if we blow it, then we’ve blown it. And for everybody’s sake, I don’t think we can afford to blow it.” He looks at Myka. She considers rolling her eyes, but settles for drumming harder on her flesh. She wishes it were enough to cause some kind of permanent damage.

“Yes, only one chance,” Jane says. She’s surprisingly subdued.

“So have you figured out what to do with the bomb?” Myka asks, almost diffidently. She is not going to admit the possibility of this working. She is not. This is some kind of fantasy story, one that Helena would write, except this one wouldn’t be based on any of her freakishly brilliant experiments. This is just straight up outside of the realm of possibility. “Because if we can’t defuse it in time, or contain it in a different way, then what’s the point?”

“Well, for starters, maybe we could get Steve back,” Claudia says, like she wants to hit Myka.

Myka tries to decide whether to respond to that. She barely remembers Steve, barely remembers that he died. Yes, it’s cold, but she doesn’t care. She is not letting these things matter. Then it occurs to her, “But if Jane’s in Hong Kong, we’re not going back that far. That’s not what Artie’s going to wish for, is it?”

Artie has the grace, or something, to look ashamed. “It… isn’t. Not exactly. We can’t figure out exactly where everyone was before he died, so we can’t really put the… pieces into place.”

“Put the _pieces_ into place?” Claudia says, and she says it very softly. Now Myka wants to applaud. Or she would, if she were old Myka. But she’s not.

“It’s important that we maintain our hold on the Warehouse,” Artie plows on, “Because we don’t know what the effects will be. This is going to be major. How much of this timeline will people retain? They could remember nothing. Or they could remember everything from both timelines… just imagine the consequences of that.”

“So, wait,” Pete says, “you’re saying that this could make everyone in the world go nuts? But we’re going to go ahead and do it? Do we really need the Warehouse back that bad?”

His mother stares at him. So does Artie. Myka holds her breath, because this seems to be the one argument that could keep them from even trying. And now she has begun to think that if they don’t try… she can’t complete the thought. She is trying to balance new Myka and old Myka now, and she can feel the balance slipping away from her. She is beginning to feel, beginning to want. She is beginning to fear what she will become if it doesn’t work. She sees that she has been holding that last small bit of hope in a vault, as one last spark of life’s possibility. If it goes away, if she knows for certain that there is absolutely no hope… she doesn’t think she can even be new Myka if that happens. She can’t be Myka at all. And that is what terrifies her the most.

“I think,” Jane says, and it’s in a voice that is slow and deliberate, a voice that Myka thinks she’s probably had to use a lot with Pete (and though she could attach a sneer to that thought, she doesn’t), “that we do need the Warehouse back that bad. I think that what we have lost is not just the Warehouse, but—”

“Yeah, yeah,” Pete interrupts, “I know, Mrs. Frederic, and H.G., too.”

“No,” his mother says. “I mean, yes, we lost them as well. But I think that we have also lost the Warehouse’s _purpose_.”

“So why don’t we just build a new one? That’s why we were on thirteen anyway, because they kept building new ones.”

Myka could explain it to him. Myka could, if she wanted to, explain that when something is destroyed, you can’t simply _build a new one_. If the destroyed thing was performing an essential function, there is no such thing as a new one. You can replace something only when it has finished serving its purpose. Warehouse 13 had not finished serving its purpose. Nor had Helena. Myka thinks, Myka _believes_ , that Helena would not have finished serving her purpose in Myka’s life for a long time.

But Myka keeps her mouth shut, because explaining this to Pete is not her job.

Later, she thinks it something of a shame that Pete’s mother didn’t even really try to explain it to him. Not that he actually needs to understand… he just needs to be pointed at a task, any task, and told to do it. Even as Myka’s thinking this, she realizes how it sounds: like she’s saying that Pete’s stupid, that he can’t understand anything, that he’s just a blunt instrument. Well, all right, he _is_ a blunt instrument, but he’s not stupid. He’s been acting stupid more than usual, though, since it happened. Myka supposes that what happened could have blunted him further, just as it’s sharpened her.

And she wonders whether, if the pocketwatch works, she herself will retain memories of this awful, awful time. She finds that she doesn’t much care about what happens to everyone else in the world. If everyone goes crazy, will it make a difference? The world’s pretty crazy already. She suspects that most people would find a way not to hold two different sets of memories in their heads… or rather, how to hold them in a way that they can live with. People can get through all kinds of cognitive dissonance, just by raising their level of denial. Myka wishes she could do that, but she always outsmarts herself and ends up back in whatever contradiction is giving her fits. It will be the same with this, she knows. She wonders if… if Helena does… (she can’t articulate the possibility, even in the privacy of her own mind)… anyway, she wonders if she’ll be able to look Helena in the eyes and be honest about what her response has been. She thinks that Helena, of all people, would understand falling back on extremity, because extremity is the only thing large enough to catch her, to contain her grief. But she is not sure she wants Helena to see that Myka has this in her. It would level them, and Myka is honest enough with herself to understand that she wants to retain just this slight bit of high ground. She doesn’t really have it at all anymore, she knows that, but if she could _pretend_ …

And yet she’s never been able to pretend, not where Helena’s concerned. Even at the start, even when Helena was still H.G. and not yet Helena, Myka could feel all her pretenses falling away, slipping through her desperate fingers. How she’d wanted to _impress_ H.G. Wells but couldn’t maintain even the most basic level of composure. (As if that would have impressed her anyway.)

So there will be no pretending. If Myka remembers anything, Myka will tell her everything. And if Helena is in the world again, that will be enough, no matter how she reacts.

And Myka cannot let herself keep thinking this way, so she leaves the house to find someone, anyone, against whom she can hone herself further. Because she refuses to believe that the pocketwatch will work; she refuses to stop believing that this is the only world she will know. Sharper and sharper. Harder and harder. Because whatever happens tomorrow morning, she has to hold in her head the idea that this is where it all ends up. This is the terminal. The pocketwatch may take them someplace else, but at the last she will always come back here.

She hasn’t read a book since it happened. She hasn’t watched television, hasn’t listened to music. She thinks she held a magazine on a plane, but that was only to stop Pete from talking to her. Myka has wondered, when she can bring herself to, if Helena did something similar, back then. Myka knows she built her time machine then, that she looked for artifacts, that she was doing anything she could to find her way back and save her daughter. The same clarity of purpose, bent differently. Myka knows she can’t build a time machine. And she knows that, failing the pocketwatch, her best chance—if it’s even a chance, which she doesn’t actually think it is—of finding her way back to Helena is by doing her job. Only an artifact can help her now.

Only her work can save her. And yet unless there’s a miracle, it won’t take her anywhere; she’ll be standing in that smoking, dead spot in the middle of where the Warehouse used to be for the rest of her life.

Maybe that’s how the pocketwatch really works, she thinks. Maybe when time stops so suddenly like that, it’s only at that point it can start back up again.

Maybe… and now she starts to get agitated. She’s sitting behind the wheel of the SUV, parked outside the third of Univille’s three bars, and she’s feeling terror slide into her head in a way that’s making her _feel_. Maybe the watch works only if time really did stop. She’s the only one time stopped for. Artie and Pete didn’t lose what she lost; they aren’t still standing in that spot. Even Claudia, who Myka’s just _sorry_ for, didn’t. Yes, Claudia loved Steve, in a way that Myka doesn’t pretend to understand—but Claudia’s young. She _learned_ something—a bad lesson, maybe, but… Myka can tell that she’s angry but still moving.

And that’s the difference, really. Myka’s not angry. Myka’s not resentful. Myka’s not _lashing out_ , as Pete keeps suggesting, not so subtly. Myka’s not anything. She has been stopped.

She breaks all speed records getting back to Leena’s; it’s late now, and everyone seems to have gone to bed, but she bangs on doors and yells and finally everyone gathers in the living room and she tells them, “It has to be me. Who uses it.”

“What are you talking about?” Pete demands. “And why did you have to wake us up for this?”

“Because,” she says, and all her persuading muscles have atrophied, so she’s forcing the words out, “I need your help convincing Artie. He thinks he knows, he thinks he has it now, but he’s missing the most important part. I _know_ it.”

“You don’t get vibes, Myka,” Pete tells her. “How can you possibly know?”

Leena says, quietly, “It doesn’t matter, Pete. She’s sure. She’s absolutely sure.”

Myka smiles at Leena. It is the first time since it happened that Myka has smiled in a way that involves her eyes. (Oh, she has smiled at women, and they have smiled back. The corners of their eyes moved; Myka, trained as she is, watched for that. The corners of Myka’s eyes did not move at all, but the women did not notice.)

“Okay,” Claudia says. “Fine. I’ll support you, or whatever. But… what about Steve? Their whole thing about the pieces—that’s stupid and pointless. If you’re going to be the one who uses it, you’re going to be the one who wishes, right?”

“I hope so,” Myka says. “I don’t know what the rules are.”

“I don’t care what the rules are,” Claudia says. “And neither do you.”

Myka looks at her and thinks that Claudia’s anger is turning into something almost as sharp as Myka herself. “No,” she agrees. “I don’t. Pieces. You said pieces. They want all the pieces in the right places. It’s all about the pieces, and how we think we know their places, and we think we know how they’re supposed to move, but we don’t, not really. So you know what? I’ll tell you this: I’ll do whatever I can to change the rules. It’s the only way to solve the puzzle.”

And then Claudia smiles. For what Myka suspects is _her_ first time since it happened.

Pete, as might have been expected, looks baffled. He says, “But what if everybody goes crazy? What if the pieces thing is really that important and nobody’s got control of anything, particularly the Warehouse?”

“If it is,” Myka says, “then I will have done something awful. And then I’ll need to fix that too.”

“But you don’t know _how_!” he wails. He sounds so lost. The other Myka would have tried to reassure him, probably, but this Myka has no words for that. She has only the certainty that things have to be made different and that she has to be the one to do it. And that she has to do it _now_.

Leena takes over the task of consoling Pete. “Things can’t go on the way they are,” she tells him. “It isn’t right. You know that. I’m sure you can feel it. Just sit still for a minute.”

“I can’t tell what parts aren’t right,” he almost-whines. “All the vibes are bad. Shouldn’t I feel some kind of good vibes from Myka, if what she wants to do is the right thing?”

Leena cocks her head at Myka, who grimaces. Leena turns back to Pete. “There is no possible way you could feel good vibes of any sort from Myka right now. I think you know that too.”

Pete looks up. Myka looks away, but she can feel his eyes. He’s accusing her of being desperate enough to risk everything for a completely uncertain outcome, and he’s angry that she would even think to try something so large. She understands his anger; he and his mother both survived the first time, but there’s no guarantee they’ll survive any attempt at a fix. Even if he’s not happy with the way things are now, he’s in a much more positive place than any of the rest of them. And Myka would like to be able to hate him for that, but she knows that if their positions were reversed, if Helena had been the one to survive and Jane the one killed, she herself would be making the same arguments, using the same tone. No question about it.

Improbably, Pete starts to cry. Myka is taken aback in a way that she thought was beyond her capacity. Claudia and Leena are similarly affected; their mouths hang open as they watch his bulky shoulders heave.

They stand there for a length of time that Myka can’t measure. Eventually Pete begins to gulp for air and wipe ineffectively at the moisture all over his face. Leena walks to the side table. She picks up a box of tissues gingerly, as if it might bite, and slowly approaches Pete to hand it to him, as if he too might bite.

He honks his nose several times, into several tissues, which he tosses to the floor. “I won’t stop you,” he says. Myka waits. “But I can’t watch you do it.” He leans his head down on his lap. “Because I’m afraid. I’m a coward.”

“You’re not a coward,” Leena says quickly. She looks at Claudia and Myka as if she expects them to back her up, but neither says anything. Myka can’t disagree with him; he _is_ a coward. Because she would be exactly the same kind of coward. She’d cry the same way at the possibility of not being able to escape disaster with what was most dear to her. And then she gives a little hiccup of something like a laugh, because she suddenly sees, completely clearly, how Helena would _not_ cry, how she would put on that resolute face and square her shoulders and quirk an eyebrow at Myka and _challenge_ her to move forward into the unknown.

“Hey, Lattimer,” Myka says. His head jerks up, because her voice isn’t new Myka’s voice. It’s from before. She’s done it on purpose, of course, but it’s something of a surprise to her too, because she honestly hadn’t been sure she could still produce that voice. But, so, she can. New information. “Listen to me,” she goes on. “The whole time we’ve been doing this job, we’ve done things that if we got them wrong… we didn’t know what would happen. Right?”

Pete nods. She imagines that his mother would recognize this nod. It’s a little boy agreeing with somebody telling him something serious about the world, something he isn’t sure he’s quite old enough to understand. The little boy suspects he’s going to be led into a trap of some kind, but he’s willing to go along with it, because he wants everyone to believe he’s much older and wiser than he really is.

“I won’t try to tell you that I know what I’m doing now,” she says. “All I do know is, this is the only thing I can imagine doing.”

He gulps a couple more times. Then he nods. “Okay. I get it. You’re saving the world. And if it doesn’t work, at least you tried. I get it. I would… I would have to do the same thing, I guess.”

Myka shakes her head. “That’s not a guess.”

“No,” he agrees. “It’s not a guess. I know for sure. I would.”

And that’s how they find themselves—well, Myka, Pete, and Artie find themselves—standing in the middle of the scorched earth where the Warehouse used to loom. Myka is holding the pocketwatch, and Artie is holding his head in his hands. Pete looks like he’s going to throw up, but he’s there, which is all Myka could have asked for, but as it’s turned out, the fact that they’re there at all is because of Pete.

It was Pete who had convinced Artie that Myka was right—or as right as anyone could be, under the circumstances. Artie had tried to argue that since MacPherson had given the watch to him, he had to be the one to use it. Pete had said, flatly, “Since when do artifacts work like that?” Then Artie had tried to argue that since he was the one holding the pocketwatch when it happened, he had to be the one to use it to undo what happened. Pete had said, equally flatly, “Yeah, but Myka’s not going to use it in this pristine, everybody in the right place, nothing different from before way.”

Artie had then looked at them both, in turn, for what seemed like minutes, opportunity, ticking away. “You’d do anything, I know,” he said to Myka. “But here’s why I’ll go along: the two of you are working together on this.” He rubbed his face. “But we’re going to the crater,” he said. “I’m not going to take a chance on anything happening within range of anyone else.” That had seemed, Myka admitted, like a logical precaution, so…

…here they are.

END


End file.
